Google Writes JS Engine for Internet Explorer

The IE9 team published a video today showing what we can expect from IE9â€™s JavaScript when it launches. No, Google didnâ€™t actually write the code for their new JS Engine, but it sure spelled out the roadmap. In the video, the engineers talk candidly about their new engine, from copying V8â€™s JIT and polymorphic inline caching, to copying V8â€™s irrexp optimized regular expression library. They even politely acknowledge that Chrome is â€œdoing a really good jobâ€.

In the video, IE9 is still quite a bit slower than Chrome. But it is fantastically superior to IE8.

The great thing about this is that competition works. Microsoft had the opportunity, but didnâ€™t significantly improve their JS engine performance for the last 10 years. It took Google Chrome, what Ballmer calls a â€œrounding errorâ€ to finally make Microsoft improve in this area. In a few years, whether you pick IE or Chrome or Firefox as your browser, rest assured your browser is fast because of competition.